Free from Microsoft?

Anyone free from Microsoft products? With those with computers at home, are you completely free from using any Microsoft products? What are the pains you feel due to not having Microsoft Word, Windows, whatever. When on Red Hat Linux, I wanted to copy something from gnu emacs (xemacs?) to Netscape's URL Location and I could not. Ouch, I thought. That never happened to me on Windows. xemacs and Netscape don't talk? Although not soon, I could see myself buying a new (used?) system that fully supports the RedHat distribution of Linux and I will be required to decide whether or not I will want/need to dual boot with Windows. If I need to dualboot, I have the extra headache of making sure everything (I mean everything) works with a latest version of Windows and Linux. As a consumer, I even might insist (*gasp*) that they both be supported by Microsoft and RedHat support. I know. I know. Crazy idea, huh? When I bought Redhat with support, they did more than they should. However, the bottom line from some of those techno. supporters was "we do not support that video card/sound card/whatever". *sigh* Are you free? Does it hurt? Is it safe?

I did try... I had two networked machines at home, one running linux and one running Solaris. However, because of either the slightly fussy nature of netscape on linux (the box that connected to the internet) or some OS-specific site pages, I couldn't get onto all the sites that I needed to. In contrast, the Solaris OS has a better implementation of Netscape but I haven't got around to setting up a dialup PPP on that machine. So now (reluctantly) I have a spare disk with Windows loaded on it so I can swap the disks and conveniently do other things that I need to. As far as the supported cards thing, when I built my linux box, I only bought supported hardware and made sure that everything was on the supported list before installing. Which made things significantly easier. Same with (intel) Solaris - I had to be sure that every component I used was supported before installing. I'd rather not use Windows, but unfortunately it has the most money pumped into it, and seems to have advantages with some applications dammit. Of course I wish I was free of Bill's Empire... maybe some time soon...

Michael Finney
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Joined: Jan 25, 1999
Posts: 508

posted Nov 03, 2000 08:50:00

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What kind of sites are OS specific that you needed to get to?

George Brown
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Joined: Sep 26, 2000
Posts: 919

posted Nov 03, 2000 10:43:00

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ok, OS-specific is probably a bad term for it. implementation-specific is probably a bit more accurate. I kept trying to connect to two shopping home delivery services, what you might call internet grocery ordering, from two chains we have here in the UK (don't know how international they are today), Tesco and Sainsbury's. Both of them would crash and burn in the linux netscape, where the Windows netscape would cope. I hate to say that, because I wish the linux version could have done it better. The fonts in the linux netscape were pretty much broken too and there were some erratic bugs that would bring down the window manager. But netscape is an ongoing and relatively young open source project, so I expect that these are just teething problems. The Windows version of Netscape seems to be more 'mature' as it has had a bit more time to be developed.